Qantas taps social media to spruik accommodation

Qantas is offering domestic accommodation bookings through a new online service designed to tap into the social aspect of travel.

Known as Hooroo, the website features photos and travel stories posted by its community of travellers. Tourism Australia research shows that almost three quarters of the country’s Facebook users boast about trips through the social network, while 20 per cent say they have booked trips after seeing what friends posted.

The launch of an accommodation website takes Qantas into a very competitive market against well-established rivals like wotif.com, tripadvisor.com.au and stayz.com.au, which is owned by Fairfax Media, publisher of The Australian Financial Review.

Hooroo is headed by executive manager Simon Chamberlain, who has been working on the project since joining Qantas 18 months ago.

“We started out with a vision to shake up the way people search and book online accommodation,” he told a media briefing in Sydney on Wednesday morning. “The businesses that are in this space haven’t evolved for a number of years.”

Hooroo has 4500 accommodation partners signed up so far ranging from expensive hotels to budget hostels. It plans to offer international accommodation soon.

Travellers can use the site to search for accommodation by looking at photos, maps or price lists.

A lawyer by trade, Mr Chamberlain previously spent six years working for Hitwise, an Australian company that monitor consumer behaviour online, which was sold to the UK’s Experian in 2007.

Hooroo, which will operate as a stand-alone company, is live from July 18. It has been used as the accommodation booking engine on Jetstar’s website since November 2011 and for the Qantas site since last month.

The service has been built using “cloud” or internet-based technology, which means capacity can be scaled up or down to meet user demand. This meant Hooroo’s infrastructure could be built within weeks at a fraction of the cost.